About

This Dama webapp game is built by Yasmin A. Zaraket for her Computing 2 project in Design Engineering, Imperial College London, July 2022.

Turkish Draughts, also known as Dama is a variant of the well-known board game "draughts". It originates from countries around the Mediterranean Sea and in the Middle East. These countries include Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, and Greece.

Dama consists of a standard 8 x 8 board with 16 pieces (also called men) lined up in two rows on each side, making a total of 32 pieces (16 per player). White always moves first.

The pieces move orthogonally forwards or sideways one square, capturing by means of a jump. They cannot move or capture backwards or diagonally. When a piece reaches the back row, it promotes to a queen. Queens can move any number of empty squares orthogonally forwards, backwards or sideways. A queen captures by jumping over a single piece any number of empty squares away, landing on any open square beyond the captured piece along a straight line.

If a jump is available it must be taken. This is where the beauty, and strategy, of the game lies. If there is more than one way to jump, the one capturing the most number of pieces must be taken. If there is more than one way to capture the maximum number of pieces, the player may choose.

Pieces are removed from the board immediately after being jumped. There is no distinction between a queen and a normal piece during captures. A player wins if the opponent has no more pieces.

There are also other variants of Dama and Draughts. These include Armenian draughts (also known as Tama), Keny (Turkish), Croda (Croatian), and Dameo (Dutch).

For a tutorial on how to play, kindly click on the Tutorial tab in the bar above.

Wikipedia Page